All Electric Trains in The Netherlands Are Now 100% Wind-Powered

The Netherland's national railway company, NS, has announced that all of its electric passenger trains are now 100 percent powered by wind energy.

NS first announced their target for a wind-powered train fleet back in 2015, but they've hit their target a year earlier than planned - way ahead of their 2018 goal.

"Since 1 January, 100 percent of our trains are running on wind energy," said NS spokesman, Ton Boon, in a press release sent to the AFP. "So we in fact reached our goal a year earlier than planned."

In 2015, NS partnered with Dutch electricity company Eneco. Their goal was getting NS's entire electric train fleet wind-powered by January 2018.

Half of the fleet was already wind-powered, but in order to get the entire system away from fossil fuels, they needed to either build more local wind farms or buy in wind energy from neighbouring countries, such as Denmark.

The Dutch have a long history with wind energy, and have been using windmills to drain water and mill grain since the 17th and 18th centuries. But now the nation is using more sophisticated wind turbines to generate electricity.

And although trains are usually thought of as pretty environmentally friendly compared to fuel-heavy cars, the NS fleet annually consumes 1.2 billion kWh of wind energy from Eneco - equivalent to the amount of electricity consumed by all households in Amsterdam in a year.

"Mobility is responsible for 20 percent of CO2 emissions in the Netherlands, and if we want to keep travelling, it is important that we do this without burdening the environment with CO2 and particulate matter," Eneco account manager Michel Kerkhof told Railway Technology back in 2015.

"This contract offers all Dutch citizens the option to make a climate neutral trip, regardless of distance."

The collaboration now hopes to reduce the energy used per passenger by a further 35 percent by 2020 compared to 2005.

And if global trends are anything to go by, it shouldn't be that hard. Just last year, Costa Rica was able to go 250 days without burning any fossil fuels, largely thanks to its hydro, geothermal, and wind energy.

Scotland was also able to generate more wind electricity than the entire country could use on a particularly windy day in 2016. And Denmark got 42 percent of its national electricity from wind power in 2015, despite having two of its biggest wind farms offline.